This paper explores the intersections of historical and contemporary struggles for Black freedom in the United States through the construct of chaperoning freedom. By demonstrating how Black freedoms have been historically disciplined, the author uses Black feminist autoethnography, and histopoetics, to navigate the tension between past injustices and present-day political policies. By revisiting landmark legal cases and examining contemporary legislative measures, the author highlights the persistent and evolving nature of systemic racism and its impact on marginalized communities. This paper underscores an urgency in understanding freedom, proposing that these narratives serve as a bridge to more equitable futures.
This paper theorizes constructive cultural world-making - the deliberate construction of alternative realities through performance, aesthetics, and meaning-making - as a framework for understanding resistance. Central to this framework is re-imaging - a visual-lyrical dialectic that simultaneously deconstructs colonial epistemic violence and constructs alternative realities grounded in Igbo epistemologies. Drawing on African decolonial scholarship and centering the Igbo cosmological principles of ndu (life force), chi (personal destiny), and an egalitarian ethos, I show how Ugwo Ndi Ocha enacts constructive cultural world-making through call-and-response, sonic layering, costuming, spatial arrangement, and alternating visualizations. The framework reframes resistance as generative rather than oppositional foregrounding what cultural practice creates rather than what it opposes.
This study examines how generative AI reshapes sacred visual knowledge within Yoruba cosmology. Through visual rhetorical analysis of AI-generated images of five Orisa across three platforms, I identify two recurring distortions: the epistemic violence of default whiteness, which recasts sacred figures through Eurocentric aesthetic norms, and the spiritual violence of decontextualization, which severs symbols from the relations that give them force. These distortions reflect an extractive gaze rooted in digital coloniality. The study traces how such distortions reshape collective memory and turns to the Yoruba ethical concept of lwa for rethinking how sacred knowledge circulates in digital environments.
Disney has walked a tightrope in its public relationship to "wokeness," amplifying and scaling back commitments to diversity and inclusion, most recently through the removal of its "Reimagine Tomorrow" program. This essay examines this tension across Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports produced from 2019-2022. We argue that Disney promoted its diversity and inclusion efforts through overrepresentation of girls of color, relying heavily on their images in both CSR reports "Reimagine Tomorrow." This hypervisibility allows Disney to signal palatable racial diversity that ultimately functions as a corporate strategy for capital accumulation.
